The process of managing a fleet of vehicles for hire, such as taxis, trains, buses and limousines, and the associated business considerations, can be quite cumbersome. For example, for a taxi service that accepts passengers on the street on an ad hoc basis, the driver typically maintains a “trip sheet” which contains relevant information for his shift in the vehicle. The information includes information about each fare—starting location, ending location, time, fare amount, etc. This information has conventionally been captured manually by each fleet owner when the driver returns the vehicle at the end of the shift. It is also used as the basis for settlement between the driver and fleet manager, and the settlement process can be quite extensive and time consuming.
This method of data capture is inefficient and results in data loss, poor reporting, and errors in the basic analysis of trip data. In many locations, the number of vehicles permitted to carry passengers for hire is limited, and it is disadvantageous when the revenue attributable to a vehicle is not maximized.
There have been recent technological advances so that, for example, the location of fleet vehicles can be determined, in real-time or near real-time, and communications containing content provided with passengers in each vehicle. The location information can be used to, for example, retrieve property left behind in a vehicle or identify a vehicle involved in an incident based on location and time of day. When passengers forget property in a vehicle, they typically can only provide the starting location, ending location, and approximate time of the trip. The communications may consist of Internet sessions or e-mail communications. The communications may also consist of advertisements that are initiated by a central distribution point and simultaneously pushed out to the vehicles over wireless communication links to be displayed to the passengers. See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,227,475 issued to Provensano et al.
Additionally, many fleet vehicles would like to use a central billing system via which a passenger can pay a driver of a vehicle for fare accumulated during a trip. As a result, it is advantageous for many reasons, to pair a passenger along with passenger information 204 about the passenger with a vehicle and vehicle information 205 about the vehicle and driver. The reasons include assisting the passenger in providing payment to the driver for fare accumulated during a trip, providing communications to the passenger which are specific to each passenger's needs or interests, sharing vehicle information 205 with the passenger to allow things such as locating which vehicle and which driver was used by the passenger during a given period, and sharing passenger information 204 with the driver in order to complete payment or in order to provide the driver with demographic information about the passenger.
Various method for pairing a passenger with a vehicle, including prompting the passenger to enter a code or other identifying information into a display device found within the vehicle, identifying the vehicle via a vehicle identification number in a mobile device of the passenger, and emitting a tone via the passenger's mobile device to be receive by a computer within the vehicle. All of these method are not passive, but rather active methods which require the passenger to act in some manner, whether that be to play a test tone, or to input information into the mobile device or a vehicle computer such as a display device found within the vehicle. It would be advantageous to have methods, systems and software that allow for a passive pairing of the passenger with the vehicle.